Reviewing the Kanji: The Review
Hi all.
We have a guest post from fellow educator friend of mine with a spot-on review of kanji.koohii.com aka "Reviewing the Kanji." So, without further ado, I present Jason's review/pep-talk! /拍手
And that’s my review, basically. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t need pep talks or pro tips to stay focused, you can load up the website and get to gettin, so to speak. If, on the other hand, you’re like me and rather do need those things, then let me explain some of the subtleties that make kanji.koohii.com the best there is at what it does, and give you some pointers before you begin to help keep you motivated and in the game.
You can consider Reviewing the Kanji like a well designed gym. With a limited but powerful selection of tools and resources, it’s a place designed to get you to whip yourself into shape. Pull up the homepage on your browser and you’ll be greeted with a simple interface and almost all the information you need to get started learning:
1) Buy Remembering the Kanji volume 1.
2) Register and start studying.
Now, at this point you might be wondering if you really need to buy Heisig’s book. You want to get started with the study-study ASAP. Not to mention the book is nearly three dozen dollars, and, let’s be serious, all it is is a specially ordered list of kanji that one can find ordered differently in any number of places online. Yes, grasshopper, you need the book. Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji, vol. 1 is not the equivalent of a walkthrough guide to the classic game Japanese Writing—it’s an indy platformer designed by a formerly young and thoroughly dissatisfied Mr. Heisig to bring minds raised in the simple, runic alphabets of Western civilization to within spitting distance of reading 文学 (literature) and writing 手紙 (letters) in the language of the land of the rising sun. The book is the game itself, and Reviewing the Kanji is the deluxe arcade-style controller that pairs so well with the game that, after having used it, you’ll wonder at how you ever got along without.
(If the book still seems like a heavy investment, consider that sitting through a single hour-long Japanese class at the university level costs about the same as Remembering the Kanji, vol. 1. More, actually, if you go with one of those really nice universities.)
So get the book, get registered, and get to studying.
I’ll refrain from spelling out in detail the core function of Reviewing the Kanji, because the website itself does so splendidly enough here (http://kanji.koohii.com/learnmore). Instead, let me spell out some of the psychological effects one encounters when one sits down to learn over 2000 kanji in a tenth of the time of one’s Chinese or Japanese counterpart.
Even if you’re not into endurance sports, you’ve probably heard of “the wall” that runners need to be careful of hitting during marathons. An average person burns through the glycogen stores in their liver and muscles after about 24 kilometers (15 miles), at which point they feel suddenly drained and tired, unable to go on. This effect is known as “hitting the wall,” and it’s the closest analogy I can think of to progressing through RtK.
The wall to watch out for in RtK is loosely defined as being around kanji #1000. There are many reasons why people tend to drop out of the RtK race around this time, but for my money the single most influential effect is the ratio of time one spends studying new material to the time one spends reviewing previously learned material. As this ratio becomes more and more unbalanced as time goes on, it becomes harder to maintain one’s motivation. When you first set down to RtK seriously, you’ll cruise through one hundred, two hundred kanji in no time. In a few days, you’ll feel superhuman for having easily learned several hundred kanji well enough to write and brag to all your friends about. I was in the mid-300s before I started noticing how this phase—the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Harder! phase—ends: slowly, imperceptibly, the kanji get more and more complex. Now, this is due to the nature of Heisig’s unique listing of the kanji by radical, and at first this is no problem for the student in terms of acquisition. But in terms of retention, you start to make more mistakes day after day. Ususally mistakes never account for more than 10-30% of your total study pile, but you feel like you’re losing seconds to the clock. Soon you’re hacking through considerably fewer new kanji per hour of study, and at a certain point (was it the end of lesson 29 for me? 30?), studying is slowly but surely consigned to the back-burner of your To Do List, then begrudgingly ignored altogether.
Maybe you won’t hit the wall. Lots of us do, but some are more prepared than others. (Heisig and many of his students famously completed his entire course in a month—but they needed to study eight hours per day for a solid 30 days to do it.) I recommend preparing to downshift your expectations of progress after those initial chapters and stick to a slower, more practical pace as you advance through the lessons. Progressing gradually ends up being faster than burning out and quitting. Slow and steady are the winners of this race.
Now, thankfully you’re not in this race alone. There have been lots of people who have RtK’d over the years, and the RevtK website has a forum with a record of all these past conversations. You can find all sorts of advice and interesting information here, and you can be sure that many of the posts written years ago were written by people who nowadays earn a living in Japan. These people got their start in RtK, just like you will.
I didn’t personally use the forums for advice on RtKing itself. (Though I did make copious use of the user-generated Shared Stories section in the kanji list itself. Sometimes you come across a seemingly simple kanji like 晩nightfall, only to get stuck with the seemingly random bits of 日day and 兔rabbit. If you come up with a weak initial story, you’re likely to forget it days or weeks down the line. Thankfully, RtK user Asriel reminds us that Japanese people see a rabbit in the moon whereas Westerners often see a Man in the Moon. With that in mind, it’s relatively easy to imagine that 晩 shows nightfall, the time when the day leaves to make way for the rabbit.) What was most useful for me in the forums was learning about corners of the Internet where I could find interesting, free content in Japanese. A lot of the users at Kanji Koohii knew about made-in-Japan podcasts, grammar websites, blogs, and other fun ways to whittle away the hours. I already had a healthy collection of anime to watch over and over, but I never would have been able to expand my Japanese-content horizons, so to speak, without combing through the threads of the forum during those times when I would otherwise be surfing Facebook or checking the (Anglosphere) news.
This is something you can do long before you finish RtK. Even with the agent of smartphones, you can’t study all the time. Sometimes you need to, for example, sleep. By sheer coincidence I was the recipient of a gag gift at a friend’s wedding back in 2008—it was a neck pillow with a speaker in it. I guess it was designed for…well, I was going to say airline passengers, but those speakers would have been pretty disruptive… At any rate, in early 2009 when I really got on the ball with this RtK thing, I noticed that I did in fact have this speaker pillow that was gathering dust, so I decided to try taking the advice of gaijin guru Khatzumoto from All Japanese All the Time and listen to Japanese while I slept. The Kanji Koohii forum had a thread of recommended podcasts for people looking to get their listen on, so I downloaded a bunch of them, made a playlist, and osmosed Japanese podcasts while I slept.
Which is to say, you’ll find your own weird way to stay interested as you slog through the mute world of kanji. (I wouldn’t call it a slog, though; seeing the look on people’s faces when you can write hundreds of complicated ideograms after having studied for only a few weeks is enough of an ego boost to keep you focused on your study goals for a long while.) But one day you’ll be done with RtK, and then the fun really begins. You’ll find your own hobbies and habits, but for me, being able to crack open a manga for fun, to follow interesting Japanese thinkers, comedians, and designers on Twitter, and to watch Chinese kung fu dramas subtitled in Japanese are experiences that have made my life personally more fulfilling, which is no 小(small, #105) 芋(potatoes, #1655).
Good luck, grasshoppers. Remembering the Kanji is a simpler process to understand than it is to work through, but I promise you have it in you to do this. It’s just a matter of 時.